To Thomas Arthur Nelson (Lothian and Border Horse)
My Dear Tommy,
You and I have long an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans call the “dime novel” and which we know as the “shocker”—the romance where the incidents the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible. During an illness last winter I exhausted my store of those aids to cheerfulness, and was driven to write one for myself. This little volume is the result, and I should like to put your name on it in memory of our long friendship, in the days when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the facts.
J. B.